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Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, July 2018

Reality Checking with Brent Raynes

by: Brent Raynes

UFOs and Religious Manifestations

In The Mount Zion Reporter (Vol. 29, No. 6, Sept./Oct. 1983), in a feature entitled Our Call To Jerusalem, Andrew N. Dugger described how following the passing of his father, A.F. Dugger, a Christian Minister of the Church of God, back in 1910, he believed that he soon afterwards saw a divine illumination that he reasoned was a sign that he should follow in his dad's footsteps. In his early 20's, Andrew and a young man about 18, were outdoors in their Nebraska neighborhood when they both observed in the sky “a huge circle about the size of a large tractor wheel.” He added, “I was filled with a divine ecstasy which is not possible to explain, but it seemed as if there was no weight on my feet. A glorious feeling surged over me. I was praising the Almighty.”

It had also been accompanied by a flashing light initially that then stopped flashing, but continued to illuminate the area. “When the light ceased about me I felt weight again on my feet,” Dugger wrote. “The boy had disappeared. As I ran to the house a few rods away to tell mother about the strange experience the same light appeared about half way up in the heavens...”

“At times during the day, when I was alone, high up in the heavens and coming from the north, I would hear the most beautiful music,” he continued. “The sound of hundreds of instruments would be faintly heard. It would grow plainer and plainer and, passing over, it would vanish away to the southwest. The music came in waves, up and down, with perfect harmony. My brother was with me on one occasion when the music passed overhead. He exclaimed, 'Where is that music coming from?' I said, 'It is up in the heavens, the same as I have heard a number of times.'”

In “Beyond UFOs: The Science of Consciousness and Contact with Non Human Intelligence,” coming out on August 1st, being produced by the Dr. Edgar Mitchell Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences, I have a chapter where I explore the intriguing parallels between UFO and religious phenomena. Previous authors, like John Keel and Jacques Vallee and others have, through the years, delved into these historic similarities. “Enoch's legendary excursions to other worlds in 4,000 B.C. rank him as the first known contactee,” John Keel wrote in The Flying Saucer Subculture (1994). “Emmanuel Swedenberg, the Swedish mathematician (1688-1772), had years of experience in the twilight world of space travelers and angelic messengers and wrote a number of books detailing life on other worlds.” Marian apparitions, angelic visitations, assorted miracles of various types bear remarkable parallels to UFO-type phenomena. Well-known religious manifestations of the 20th century like those of Fatima, Portugal; Garabandal, Spain; Medjugorje, Bosnia; Zeitoun, Egypt, and many others, contain a tremendous number of such evidential parallels.

Sometimes a Dark Side...

A Tennessee housewife, who described to me experiencing a number of encounters with UFOs and the greys, also described some really bizarre religious-type episodes too. In one, she said she awoke one night to find a strange being leaned over her and it was like it was trying to take her breath. She screamed and saw this human-like being “disappear through the wall near the window,” she said. “There, up on a large tree an owl sat, that had red glowings eyes. It flew away quickly.”

She felt that there was a man in her town, who possessed shamanic type abilities, who she said had powerful spirit energies who was attacking her psychically, able to exert some control over her. “All the while that he was destroying my life I felt ecstacy,” she told me. “It was the experience to where if there was a wall of fire where there was glass and nails and jagged pieces of metal and everything – you'd walk barefoot through that fire just to experience that feeling.”

John Keel once wrote in Saga's UFO Report (January 1978): “When a human is exposed to a religious 'vision' he or she is frequently overcome by a pleasurable sensation known as 'ecstasy' which is very similar to a sexual experience. Eyewitnesses in low-level UFO cases report the same thing – a series of sensations so delightful that they are willing, even anxious, to have repeated experiences with flying saucers.”

There are times – many times - where the two overlap; UFOs and religious phenomena.

The Tennessee housewife meanwhile added the following: “There were times when I just absolutely would burst out of my house at 3 o'clock in the morning. I wouldn't even know where I was going and I would wind up in the woods near where this man lived. And there was a dark figure. It was waiting. It had a long black robe and he had huge wings. I could see that it had a pale face, and I would hear it's wings flapping.”

“I kept it from my husband because I thought to myself, 'He'll think I'm crazy for sure. Who has seen anything like that?'” However, the day before they moved out of that city that they resided in at the time, the family was gathered together at a local park when the woman's husband told her to look up at the sky. She recalled, “There's this bubble, that's clear, but there's (this) thing... It had hands on the inside of that bubble and its legs like that (indicated they were apart) and it's wings sort of stretched out. It had wings kind of like a bat and you could see that was the shape of this thing, in that bubble. Then it just floated away over the city and disappeared.”

Her husband even recalled this sighting for me. “It was like a big, clear bubble, and it was a gargoyle type thing that was floating inside,” he told me. “It was a winged, devil looking thing. I had never seen anything like that before.”

“What happened?” the wife asked her husband, who had just awakened with a startle, both of them ufologists in Washington state. “I just saw something come at me and it was hissing. I think it was Elizabeth.” The next day when they returned to the Seattle area, where they lived, they learned the dreadful news that this Elizabeth had died that night, September 6, 1980, in a head-on car collision.

An alien experiencer, ever since the couple had been working on Elizabeth's case (he was a hypnotist), very strange things had been happening. One night the husband had awakened to see alien beings enter their bedroom. There were two tall thin beings in diving suit type garb with balaclava type headwear, a short being with white Dutch Boy type hair, wrap around blue eyes and a box type nose, and, lo and behold, Elizabeth! The wife knew something was going on and tried to wake up, but couldn't. When they awakened in the morning all seemed normal, but then the husband noticed half of the white of one of his eyes was blood red. Holding the eyelid out from the eyeball, he saw a “square puncture wound.” “There was no pain to it,” he insisted. “I was told by some psychics that it was an implant, and everybody in the Seattle (support) group saw it.”

Also, while the couple was investigating Elizabeth's case, there was an incident with an unexplained sulphur smell. “We had our car filled up with that sulphur and we told it, 'Be gone in the name of Jesus Christ,' and it left,” the wife told me. “That was really weird.”

In their case file on Elizabeth, the couple had written how she had described hearing “strange things in her house,” like unexplained “footsteps,” and how she “felt something was going to happen.” “She could feel presence of people in her house. Was petrified,” report stated. On one page of a hypnotic transcript she was questioned about unusual odors, and remarked, “Smells like sulphur. Stinky eggs.”